


without a hurt (the heart is hollow)

by chicleeblair



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Community: tw_bigbang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-11
Updated: 2010-10-11
Packaged: 2017-10-12 14:47:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/125977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicleeblair/pseuds/chicleeblair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for tw_bigbang Jack has been gone for over a year, and Gwen is up to her eyeballs keeping the darkness from overwhelming Cardiff. She doesn't want to accept the task given to her by a mysterious woman on a windy night, but an accident gives her no choice. Millennia and miles away Jack has done all that he can to forget his past. Gwen must decide whether she will help him regain his memory, or if she would rather lose herself in the ether.</p>
            </blockquote>





	without a hurt (the heart is hollow)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my wonderful beta 51stcenturyfox and artist geckoholic. The art that goes with this fic can be seen here:
> 
>  
> 
> http://i298.photobucket.com/albums/mm241/geckoholic01/ll_misc/twbb10/twbb2-1.png

The sun was sinking down into Cardiff Bay, pulling with it the orange glow of twilight. Families were heading indoors, more worried than most city-dwellers about what might be hiding on their streets in the dark. The braver ones—or the ones more cocky and desperate for human interaction—were the students. They made their way to bars and clubs, the violent shadows that haunted irreverent to their pursuit of fun.

So it had always been, since the youth were the ones stumbling over postboxes on their way home from dancehalls during the blackouts of the Second World War. Their parents sat at home in the shelter fretting about foreign threat, as these students' parents hung about in front of curtained windows worrying about alien threat. They couldn't be positive, they whispered to each other, but didn't it seem that things had gotten, well, worse lately? And had anyone seen that obnoxious Torchwood van? Where were they when you needed them? Ever since that nasty business--- but then they stopped and pulled close their children who had come for their goodnight kisses until little Bobby squirmed. "Gerroff, Mam."

They couldn't know that the secret institution that had once been the word they hissed in threat the way some said "bogeyman", but appealed to when the world around them was too strong to comprehend, had been reduced to one woman. The only woman, as it happened, who would bring her child out on a Cardiff street past the time that the sun had set. Gwen Cooper was not afraid of the dark, because she knew there were many worse things that were out there to scare her. Nor did she want Anwen to fear the blackening sky, because to her it held hope. Her child would learn to take comfort in the stars, and not in the shaky ground beneath her feet.

Her husband, the man for whom the adjective "long-suffering" always applied, despaired of curing her of the habit of taking their daughter out past sunset. He had objected at first, but when she demanded, "And who better to protect her against what's out there than me?" he had to concede. He was one of the only ones that knew, after all, that Torchwood was not dead. Torchwood was still there, ensnaring Weevils and chasing down blowfish. It was Cardiff that had changed in the way they perceived the aliens in their midst. The uncertainty and amusement had turned into fear, and so were Torchwood to announce itself to them they too would be feared, maybe even fought against. Better to lie underground in a way that they never had before, silent vigilantes of Cardiff.

Gwen considered these changes as she pushed Anwen's pram down the deserted streets near the Millennium Centre. The streetlights periodically illuminated the tiny girl's placid face. The route they were taking was familiar, and the child peaceful in general. One would never know that the time before she came into the world had been the most tumultuous of her mother's life.

"Here we are then, lovey," Gwen said, parking the park near the repaved Roald Dahl Plass. She reached down and picked the baby up. "Omph, so big," she cooed. The one-year-old giggled in response, locking her fingers around the hair that hung nearest her mother's ear. "Shall we go look at the water? Water?"

"Watuh," the baby agreed.

Gwen smiled. It was a step up from "Wa-Wa", which had been code for the Bay until two weeks before Anwen's first birthday. "Good talking, my darling."

She carried the girl down the steps and to the railing that separated the wooden planks from the churning water of the Bay. The wind whipping the water into a frenzy blew Gwen's hair, and she tugged her daughter's pink knit hat more firmly over her ears. To Gwen this air was familiar, the norm for the nights when they would return to the Hub after a chase, laughing at Jack, teasing Owen. Maybe a bit of drink in them, enough to take the edge of the horror, and to accentuate the humour in their lives. Camaraderie was what she remembered about those days, and what she lacked now. Her staff were mostly recruited from former UNIT soldiers that they had so-generously suggested to her, and they got the job done with very little outside socialising. With her own priorities, Gwen didn't know how to change that. All that she knew was that a Torchwood without togetherness caused even more darkness to engulf Cardiff.

"'Tar!" A chubby finger thrust skywards broke Gwen's view of the water, and she shifted her focus. No doubt the little one was used to her mother's drifts into thought. She was a pensive child herself, often staring at her parents with knowing looks that made Rhys wonder if she'd been aware in the womb. Gwen wasn't ruling it out.

"Yes, darling, there are a lot of stars tonight. They've come back," she added. The memories of a time without stars was hazy, and she rather thought she wasn't supposed to know that they were in her head. But then, there were thousands of pieces of information in her head she wasn't supposed to know.

"Cardiff's going to bed for the night, so we can see them. Good night, Cardiff, eh? Who's in those stars, Anwen? Who's up there?"

"Un-Ja."

"Very good!" Gwen said, bouncing the baby on her hip. Anwen gave a one-toothed grin. "And wouldn't he love you, baby girl? Wouldn't he be proud of how you've grown? You were still inside of Mummy when he left. He'd love you. He does love you, I imagine, in his way. But he was so sad. We get sad, don't we darling? And we don't all have giggly little girls to make us happy. Oh, but wouldn't he laugh at you."

She thought of Jack's chuckle, and his willingness to be goofy while in the background serious problems were being solved. Often, she wished she had that. She knew that one day Rhys would be the fun parent, while she would be too solemn. Her hope was that Anwen would become attached to her long before that.

"Wouldn't he just?"

Gwen jumped, pulling Anwen's head against her chest instinctively before turning around to face the newcomer. A woman was standing in the shadows near the old tourist office—still blocked off—so Gwen could only see her silhouette. She was of average height, with a mane of curls, but that was all Gwen could make out in the darkness.

"Who's there?" she demanded, removing her hand from the back of Anwen's hand to reach into the holster where her gun sat, always ready.

"Well, I can't say my name would mean much to you," the woman said, stepping forward. "But I can promise you that you have nothing to worry about. Please, keep your gun where it is. No use endangering that beautiful girl."

"I wouldn't be endangering her," Gwen argued, not removing a hand. "I'm a crack shot, thank you very much."

The woman had come into the light of the nearest street lamp, and so Gwen could see her red lips curl upwards. "Yes, I've heard as much. Trained by the best. No need to demonstrate tonight, I don't think." She came closer again, her high heels clacking on the wooden planks beneath them.

Gwen studied her as she approached. She had lines on her face, but her eyes were kind. There was a hardness around her lips that Gwen recognized. She was beginning to see it on her face in the mornings. The woman wore an midnight blue evening gown that had camouflaged her, so Gwen's observational skills were not deteriorating as she had thought.

"I've something for you," the woman continued, with an air of calculated informality that told Gwen that whatever it was, it was more serious than the woman wanted to let on. "And I'm taking quite a risk giving it to you. It doesn't belong here."

A snicker escaped Gwen. "Half of what's outside tonight doesn't belong here. You've come to the right place for things out of place."

The woman's bright pink tongue clacked against her bright white teeth. She was a study in solid colors; they didn't waver even in the wash of the streetlamp. "Oh Gwen Cooper, how bitter you are these days. Is it a spoiler to tell you that you won't always be this way?"

"How in the world could you know that?" Gwen demanded, scowling. She wasn't bitter; she was bloody exhausted.

"I have my sources. I don't reveal my sources. I was a journalist once, in another life. Another world." She paused, cocking her head to the side. "Quite an adventure. And the favours I got when people didn't want me opening my mouth… well…" She raised already arched-eyebrows. "Not in front of the baby, eh?"

Gwen kept her lips firmly together. The words reminded her of Jack's ramblings about other worlds and sexual exploits. She wasn't sure if this similarity made her more or less wary of the stranger. "What is it that you have then?"

The woman smiled. "I thought you'd never ask. Come on then, bring it over." She snapped her fingers. To Gwen's shock, another figure appeared out of the darkness. This time it was a ragged child. The child placed something in the woman's outstretched hand, but her eyes were on Gwen. Gwen shivered, and though the wind was still beating her hair, she knew that wasn't the cause. "Go on then," the woman urged.

The child plopped down on the ground, crossing her legs and began dealing cards out onto the dirty wood. "What in the--?" Gwen began, before realizing that they were Tarot cards.

"He beckons across time," the child said. Her voice was haunting, sing-song and yet grounded so that she demanded that she be taken seriously. "He has gone away and around and through since you last met. Much changed, much unchanged. Yet the woman is the one, the woman on the hill. Take the path through the stars, through time's shredded fabric. He will return and light reign again."

Gwen stared at the child expectantly. The young face turned up from the cards and looked back at her without expression. "Was that it then?" she asked. She took the lack of response for assent. "Well, that was helpful." She looked back up at the woman. "And, I assume, all about bloody Jack Harkness?"

The woman threw back her head and let out an echoing guffaw. "Oh, I knew I liked you. Why such contempt of the man who your daughter knows to be among the stars?"

"He's not the cure for world dissent you know? In fact quite the opposite. I miss him…" she paused, and licked her lips, which the wind had made dry. "I miss him every day, but it's not like we need him to survive."

"The city does not need him. He needs the city." The child had spoken again, after gathering up her cards and tucking them into a fold of her robe. Then she walked away from them, back into the shadows. The woman ignored her. Once Gwen might have wondered aloud about her family, but now even with her own daughter in her arms she imagined there would be some explanation there that she didn't quite want to know.

"So after that lovely prophecy, I am allowed to present you with this," the woman said, holding her hand out to Gwen. "Not sure I believe in prophecy, mind. Time is too malleable for that. But she insisted." Her hand was held out to Gwen, an item resting on it, supported only by a well-manicured thumb. "You recognise it, don't you?" she added, when Gwen's jaw dropped. Anwen, who had been silenced by awe of the tableau before her, attached her tiny fingers to her mother's lower lip. Gwen disentangled them, and then reached out the hand for the leather-encased object.

"Is it his?" she demanded, lifting her eyes as she picked it up.

"In a manner of speaking. Will it be the one you've seen him with? Well, not quite. It has to do with timelines you see, all very complicated. Did it once belong to the man you call Captain Jack Harkness? Yes, it did."

"Then I don't want it," Gwen said firmly. Anwen reached out and grabbed the object from her before she could thrust it back.

"No? Well that must have an interesting explanation."

Gwen looked away, towards the pinpricks of light that the city gave off, away from the Bay. "He comes back when he's ready," she murmured. "And we wait. Or he doesn't come back. And we go on without."

"As poetic as that is, I'm forced to tell you straight out that he won't just come back. He's trapped, in a way. Lost in another world. He needs you, like the ghost girl said. I can't make you do anything, but I can give you that and trust that you'll do the right thing." She smiled, once again flashing white teeth, before swooping her midnight blue wrap around her shoulders and turning around. "For what it's worth," she added over her shoulder a few steps later, "You do go. In this universe, at this moment, as the future stands. You go, and you succeed beautifully. But, like I said, time's malleable."

She continued walking towards a bright blue box that had also escaped Gwen's notice, though she knew what it was. The door creaked open, and a hand reached out. The woman took it. "Hello, lover," she murmured, the wind carrying her words to Gwen.

"Wait!" Gwen shouted out, moving quickly before she could get away the way one did with this box. "Who are you?" she demanded, hoping that she had earned an answer.

"Me? I am River Song," the woman said, stepping into the box. "Also known as Time Agent 67." The door closed, and she was gone.

Another moment and Gwen stood alone but for the baby. "Buh-buh!" Anwen called, flapping her hand at the spot where the police box had been. The wrist strap was still in her hand. Automatically, Gwen removed it and set off back for the pram. She set the baby into it, and watched as the child's eyes slowly sank closed, opened wide again, and sank. She watched until they stayed closed, focusing only on the baby instead of the new weight in her pocket. Sometimes that was all she could do to keep sane, focus on Anwen until clarity came. If clarity came.

This time, though, she was aware that it would be a long time before she understood what was going on around her. It always was when Jack was involved. "Bloody Jack Harkness," she muttered to herself. And then, without knowing why, she smiled. A light clicked on in the house she was passing, and the night air no longer felt cold. Something had happened; somewhere a promise had been made, even if it was only a promise to herself.

***

It taunted her. After Rhys left for work, she set the vortex manipulator on the kitchen counter and mixed Anwen's breakfast mush. There had been a note attached to the device saying that it was programmed for her, but other than that it looked no different from the one that Jack had used to open doors and hack computers for years. And she was somehow supposed to use it to save him.

She glanced at it out of the corner of her eye while she sat with her coffee, spooning food into her daughter's open mouth. "It's not like I can take off for the future," she murmured. "I have to take off for work every day and that's leaving you enough, isn't it love?"

Anwen blew a spit bubble, a new trick that had Gwen keeping a bib on her at all times. Then she slapped her two pudgy hands onto the tray of her highchair, upsetting her bowl onto the table.

"Ani!" Gwen scolded. "Now Mummy has to clean up mess on top of everything. What a life." She pulled the baby out of the highchair and began to attack the spilled porridge with a sponge. Once she'd finished, she tossed the soiled sponge into the sink and dumped out the rest of her coffee. There wasn't time. She needed to muster in at Torchwood in an hour, and there was Anwen to be gotten to the crèche.

She left the baby happily playing with toys in the sitting room while she dashed upstairs to get out of her pajamas. Gone were the days when she'd meticulously shape her appearance for work, even though it would be ruined by running and alien matter within hours. Now her clothes were conservative; they gave off authority, or that was what she hoped. It was difficult trying to be superior to the UNIT troops, but she worked for it. They didn't know what she'd been through. They didn't know what Cardiff could do. That was hers to know, and hers to bear.

Pictures of those who had once known stood on her bureau. She paused while spraying perfume onto her neck to reach out a finger to the frame of the photograph of Ianto and Jack standing in front of the Millennium Centre. Jack was grinning widely, with his arm around Ianto's shoulder. Gwen had noted when she framed the photo that a woman walking behind them was looking appreciatively at his arse.

Ianto stood straight, eyes focused on the camera. There was just the hint of a smile on his face, but she hadn't bothered to try and coax more out of him. That was the look he got when he was perfectly content; when he was safe in Jack's arms. Now as she stared at the photo his eyes were accusing her of something. Not of being uncaring, but of believing herself to be on the outside. As though he knew that she thought that it wasn't her place to save Jack, because if Ianto were alive he'd have been asked first.

Momentarily she thought that if Ianto were around, Jack would be there, until she remembered the devastated look he had worn when they stood at the very back of Steven's funeral. She had held his hand mostly to make sure he had a pulse there. She wasn't honestly sure that Ianto could have made any more of a difference than she had. No, it had nothing to do with being her or being Ianto, because in his way Jack had loved them both. It had to do with what he'd been forced to do, endangering all of them, everyone he loved, and running from it.

And it was up to her, because she was the one who loved him back. With this realized, she stepped away from the photo and fastened in her earrings. That was that, then, she'd discuss it with Rhys and they'd make a plan. He wouldn't be happy about it, but she thought he'd understand. He had to know that Jack would do it in a heartbeat for any of them.

Once she'd finished dressing, she went down the stairs to gather Anwen's things for the day and make sure all of her things were in her handbag. As she was passing through the sitting room in search of her keys, she realized that Anwen was not where she left her. Lately, this was becoming a semi-common occurrence; so they'd finished baby-proofing the house and mostly let her have the run of it. The house was small enough that they could monitor her whatever, and they both agreed that there were much worse things that she could get into than the carefully monitored objects at her level in.

Still, Gwen went in search to make sure that she knew where the little girl was. She rather expected to find her in the kitchen, mimicking Gwen's earlier motions of cleaning the floor. She was big on copying housework, and Gwen joked that this made her Rhys's child without a doubt.

She was right about the location; as soon as she turned the corner into the kitchen she caught sight of the pink of Anwen's sock sticking out from behind the counter. "There you are, duckling," Gwen said, going over to pick the baby up. "What've you got?"

As soon as she asked the question, she realized what it was that Anwen was holding onto with such interest. "No, not a toy!" Gwen exclaimed. She scooped the baby up and put her hand over the object. Anwen had flipped open the cover in her curiosity, and as Gwen picked her up one finger pressed down on a button. Gwen had just enough time to see the "look at me, aren't I clever?" grin that her daughter wore before the entire world wobbled.

They were thrown into…. What? It wasn't blackness, exactly. It was a sort of swirling, flying blue...tube wasn't the word for it, but she didn't have the words. She only had the feeling of being pushed and pulled, of compression and space. All she could do was hold onto her daughter, her hands resting tightly on the back of Anwen's coveralls, and her eyes squeezed shut. Something was pushing, pushing, propelling them into the unknown. With each flash of light she was more certain that she wanted to go back; that this was not okay; that they were going to die. And then it was over.

The first thing she was aware of, after her feet hit the ground with a thump she felt through her whole body, was that Anwen was crying. The baby's earsplitting sobs echoed through her aching head, and she immediately brought her hand up to stroke the soft black curls. "Shh," she murmured. "Shh, my darling. Let Mummy figure out where we are, all right?"

Anwen did not stop, and Gwen didn't blame her. Really, she wouldn't mind a good cry now herself, but she had to take action. They were somewhere in the future, and that was all she knew. Also, she assumed they were where Jack was, but that barely registered then. She blinked rapidly, trying to clear her mind. They seemed to be standing on pavement, but it was dark around them. Decaying brick met her eyes to the left and to the right. Another moment of disconnected thought told her that they must be in an alleyway.

"Right," she murmured. "Dark alley, never the best place to be. Let's get out, shall we?" Carefully she stepped forward, still murmuring soothingly to Anwen, whose wails were dissipating into gasping sobs. A few metres in front of them, the alley opened into a street that made Gwen's jaw drop. Above them were layers and layers of vehicles—but they were vehicles that flew. It was like being in _The Jetsons_ or _Star Wars_.

Except never in those imaginings of the future where there the gas fumes that came with this. She started coughing immediately after her brain processed what was causing the grey tint in the air, and Anwen followed, her tiny body convulsing with small but deep coughs. She continued cautiously for a minute down the pavement, before a hand snaked out of a doorway that she barely noticed and they were jerked through it.

A man stood before her. Well, man was the best approximation she could give. He was seven feet tall, at least, with skin of a bright pink hue, but the deep tone he was lecturing her in seemed to be that of a man. The issue was that she couldn't understand the words.

"I'm sorry, I don't--," she began. The… Ze, she thought suddenly. Wasn't that the way Jack had described unidentifiable genders? Ze stopped and tilted ze's tenticled head. Gwen bit her lip, at a loss. What was she going to do without a common language? Then she remembered the vortex manipulator. Awkwardly balancing Anwen between her arm and side she began to fumble with the wrist strap, attaching it to her arm. "There," she said, shifting the baby to the other hip. The little girl rested her head on Gwen's shoulder, and she felt the comforting warmth of baby breath on her neck.

"Can you understand me?" she said to the alien that still stood in front of her, eyes narrowed in disapproval.

"Yes, now I can," ze said. "You have vortex manipulator?"

"No," she lied. Something in the way that he said that, coupled with the raise of one of his limbs at the question made her think that he wouldn't want her to say yes. She wasn't sure why, except that the very few times they had come up Jack had said that Time Agents weren't exactly the world's darlings. At least not when he came from. Then again, she didn't even know when she was.

"That is, it's not a time…manipulator. Just space…er well…. You see the thing is, I don't know where I am."

Ze let out a sound that Gwen could absolutely only describe as a sniff. "You are careless enough to end up in strange place with a child, and endanger her with the fumes of the vehicles. Perhaps I should report you to Those That Be."

Gwen's heart began to hammer, and she tightened her grip on Anwen. "No need for that," she said firmly, hoping to evoke the authority that she tried to wield over the UNIT troops back home. "Just tell me where I am."

"You are on Revot, the capitol planet of the Tangire system. Ruled by the Coalition. I believe," ze added, a scathing note in zes voice that told Gwen that ze had not believed her lie, "In the time that they will call the Great and Bountiful Human Empire, though my grasp of future-fact is uncertain. What, may I ask, are you looking for, if you don't know where you are?"

"A friend," Gwen asserted. "An old friend." Then she hesitated. It had suddenly occurred to her just how lost she was. "Look, I don't suppose…. Well, that is…." She bit her lip. She was about to sound very mad, but then if it was gibberish to zim, then it was gibberish. There was no apology necessary to this being she didn't know. "Don't reckon you could take me to Torchwood?"

All of hir considerable amount of limbs shot up in the air, and Gwen considered for a moment that she might have said something offensive. Anwen lifted her head up in alarm and gave out a tiny cry. Then ze exclaimed, "Yes, that is it, of course. Torchwood is where I shall send you. Come."

Ze motioned to Gwen, and nervously she followed hir into the building. Their surroundings had mostly escaped her notice during the conversation, but now she looked around. It was a shop of some sort. Metal parts were strewn around, and if she had to guess she would have said "mechanic" or "junk shop". There were a few other…beings around her. People, some of them. Others were creatures that she immediately labeled as alien, though she was aware that those were her 21st century sensibilities. She did notice that most of the clothes that the patrons of the shop wore seemed dirty. They weren't necessAnily ragged but… well, there was a bit of Splott in the air. This thought made her smile to herself a little, thinking of Ianto. He would have so many dry comments about this situation.

Ze led her to the back to a lift. Ze pushed a button and then turned to walk away. "Luck."

"Hey wait a minute. How do I get there?" Ze turned around as the lift doors opened. "Use what is on your arm," ze said, as though this were obvious. Ze raised hir limbs again.

"Er, right, thanks," she said. Inside the lift, she set Anwen down on her feet. The child clung to Gwen's leg and stuck a finger in her own mouth. Gwen flipped open the vortex manipulator, imagining the strange symbols that had covered the buttons that Jack pushed. Instead, there was a small keyboard, printed in English. In shock, she pushed out "TORCHWOOD", and then took Anwen into her arms again, just in case.

"Let's see where this takes us, shall we?" she asked the little girl. "Torchwood in the 51st century, eh?"

"Eh, eh," the baby repeated, in a singsong way.

The lift didn't just go up; it seemed almost to float, moving sideways, and diagonally until Gwen lost track. The small car was painted bright white, like a sterile room rather than a lift, and it made her uncomfortable until they finally stopped. Then the doors opened and she almost wished they could stay on, if only because in five minutes the four walls had become achingly familiar. But Anwen was shifting in her arms, pointing towards the open door, and without another choice Gwen continued on.

To her surprise, someone was waiting for her. A young woman, human-looking so there was little doubt, with cocoa-coloured skin grinned at her. She wore black trousers and a shiny violet shirt that Gwen rather envied. Her curly black hair was piled onto her head.

"Hi!" the woman said. "Would you be the lost woman that that mechanic sent up to us?"

"Yeah, I think I would," Gwen agreed, automatically smiling back at the woman in relief. "Well, not lost exactly. I have a mission here, but I wasn't expecting to leave when I did. Er… are you really Torchwood?"

"Yes of course. Come along, I'll show you." She began walking down the dark corridor around them. It seemed cleaner than that of the mechanic's shop, and they took a left turn off of it quickly enough. Gwen had to stifle a gasp. The busy room surrounding them had multiple layers. Terminals peppered it, with three or four people studying holographic displays. There was no water running through the floors, or pteranodon soAning overhead, but these items seemed unimportant. This place was Torchwood down to the bright pink stressball one of the men was throwing at another's head, and the same icon that was branded on every item they owned in Britain.

"My God," she murmured. "Three thousand bloody years."

The woman, who had gone ahead of her into the room turned sharply. "What did you say?"

Gwen clamped her mouth shut. Anwen turned to face the woman, her small eyes wide. "Say?" she echoed, and then tugged her mother's earring.

"No Ani," Gwen murmured, disentangling her daughter's hand. "I didn't say anything."

"You're not from the twenty-first, are you? Come to think of it, you look like you might be. Babies all look like that in the books."

Instinctively Gwen looked down at Anwen, with her pink t-shirt and her Osh Kosh Bgosh overalls. She did look like a storybook baby. It was why Gwen dressed her as she did, because her big blue eyes and black curls looked timeless. Not, it seemed, in the 51st Century.

The woman was peering closer at the both of them. "Are you here about him?" she asked, in a whisper.

"Him?" Gwen said, in the same uncertain voice she had used when asked about her vortex manipulator.

"The memory man," the woman explained. "They say he's from the twenty-first, or something, and only someone from then can set him right. They call him The Captain."

Gwen swallowed. _The Captain_ , she thought. _Does he fashion himself after The Doctor?_ "I… I think I might be," she admitted.

The woman straightened swiftly, and turned away. "Well, better you than me. I suppose we'll need to get you settled. No use going after him right this moment, he never appears until sun-over. Follow me, and begin."

Gwen followed, remembering when she had been in charge of orienting people to a new time. She was also wondering about the cryptic way the woman had spoke of Jack. She had half-expected to find him waiting for her at Torchwood, but it seemed that it wouldn't be that easy. Of course it wouldn't. Not with Jack Harkness involve d. With her daughter still clinging to her side, she found herself wishing she had Rhys here. He could've just knocked sense into Jack and that would be that.

Well, no it wouldn't. It wouldn't work. And Rhys was thousands of years away. That thought jarred her for a moment, until she remembered that she had time-travelled. Logic followed that she could do it again, and arrive home seconds after she left. Rhys wouldn't even know they'd gone. All he'd know was that Jack was back, and that was enough to be getting on with.

With that in mind, she set off to follow her guide.

***

Over the next few hours, Gwen began to feel more sympathy than she ever had with the group of lost souls that they had reoriented when the Rift had sent them forward in time. She was lucky, she supposed, that the onset of space travel and exploration had led to a decrease in social evolution. She imagined that it was similar to the dark ages, in a way, except that rather than there being no change, there were great amounts of change in some areas, and none in others.

Thanks to this, she was not completely in over her head as they assigned her a cover in Torchwood, and found her rooms. It turned out that the entire planet that they were on—known as Hasan 12—was made up of interconnected buildings, designed to eliminate the amount of time one could spend outside breathing the polluted air. There were even, her guide Kasha explained, terrafirmed areas designed as perfect replicas of the outdoors on other planets, that provided oxygen and vitamin D. Although she was distracted, Gwen was more than a little bit impressed.

Of course, most of her firmly believed that all of these measures—the ID cards and cover stories—were pointless. She would be leaving with Jack in a matter of hours. Still, she would arouse suspicion, she expected, if she didn't go along with their process. River Song hadn't said, after all, how long it would take to bring Jack home, only that she would be the one to do it.

"Do you require a carer for the baby?" Kasha asked, after showing them to a sparsely furnished but cozy little flat. Gwen set Anwen down on the bed, flexing her arms, which had gotten tired from holding the baby. Ani whimpered for a second, reaching up for her mother, but then became interested in the bright green and purple stripes of the comforter.

"What d'you mean exactly?" Gwen asked, sinking down on the bed next to her daughter.

Kasha shrugged. "Well, the places that the Memory Man hangs about in aren't the sort where you're going to want to take a child, first of all. And second of all, you're on your own here without a mate, so I assume you'd like a hand in taking care of her. You've got options," she added, sitting down in the chair that stood in front of the bedroom desk.

"There's robots as could do it. Or we could set you up with a monitoring system. Lots of parents do that, leastways at night. Cameras and vital monitors all hooked up to a communicator. Has to do with the baby's clothes and such. Dead useful, particularly because here in the Connected City it's so easy to get back to them, or get help if someone needs it."

Gwen chewed her lip, looking down at Anwen, who had pulled herself up to lay her head on her mother's leg. She was now placidly sucking on her fingers. Gwen ran a hand over her daughter's curls. "Monitor for now. I'd like to keep her with me as much as possible. It'll be… complicated enough as it is."

"Right. Well I'll send over all the stuff for that, and clothes for both of you. Now let's show you 'round the kitchen, shall we?"

They began the tour, with a lot of "what's this when it's at home?" from Gwen. Food prepAning was much easier these days, but she found that "fresh" here was not fresh by twenty-first century standards. There were many fewer chemicals in the food, Kasha assured her, but the amount of times she said the words "freeze dried" made Gwen wary. Still she learnt enough to make Anwen a bottle at least, and that was something.

A few hours later, the monitors had been set up, and Gwen was sitting on the bed with Anwen freshly cleaned and in pyjamas. They were made of a meshy fabric that Gwen had never seen before, but the baby was cooing happily. Gwen was just about to lay her in her cot and consider her next move when Kasha's dark face popped up—on the mirror?

"Hiya Gwen. Just thought I'd let you know that the Memory Man is probably out now. His usual haunt is marked on the map in your wriststrap. Good luck." Her face disappeared, and the mirror returned.

Gwen swallowed. She went ahead and laid the baby down, rubbing small circles on the tiny smooth back until her daughter slept. Then she double-checked the video of the girl on her watch, checked it and all its readings with the living, breathing child in front of her, and then checked her own face in the mirror about ten times, as though hoping that this time it would turn into something else. Perhaps Jack.

She knew she risked losing her nerve. There was no other choice, though, really. She couldn't work the vortex manipulator, but he could. That was one reason to find him if nothing else. So with one more soft kiss on Anwen's cheek, she left the flat. She walked with her eyes focused on the map that she could project into the air with the wrist strap. A red mark represented her destination, while she was a blue one.

People passed her, some with similar foci, others knowing their way perfectly. Eventually she entered one of the multi-directional lifts, and when she stepped out she was surrounded by the noises of a slightly seedy bar. It took up perhaps five rooms of the size of her flat. The walls were painted a bright blue, and there were flashing lights around a nearby dance floor. It was just as dim and busy as any bar in Cardiff on a Friday night, though there was perhaps less of an air of gloom than there was in Cardiff these days. It felt rather like a mix between a pub and a nineteen-nineties rave, with neon colors combating dark blues and greens.

She entered it, trying not to be distracted by the shapes and colours of its patrons. She had only one goal in mind, and Gwen had learned to set her sights on only that goal. Rebuilding Torchwood. Having Anwen. Finding Jack. It all required compartmentalisation. Soon she tuned out the raucous noise, flitting her eyes from table to table. She did double-takes once or twice, sure that she saw him.

When she made her way across the room to the bar, she recognised the shape of a hunched torso. His shoulders were pressed up against his ears, and that was all she could see, but the coat was unmistakable. She almost fell over the leg of a bright pink chair.

"Jack!" she cried, even though she knew that her wavering voice would not carry over the din of the bar. She threw herself into the space between barstools and put a hand on his shoulder. At the weight of her, he turned and ran his eyes up and down her figure. Her jaw dropped in shock that she knew was stupid. He looked the same as ever, right down to the cocky, appraising grin he was giving her. Not a hair on his head had changed colour, not a wrinkle had appeared near his eyes. "Jack," she whispered, this time sure he would hear her.

His expression did not change. The white tooth grin remained as he held up one long finger. "Hold on," he said. Then he slid a hand up his arm, revealing a wrist strap similar, but not identical to the one he now wore. He flipped it open and pressed a button.   
Confusedly, Gwen listened to the tinny voice that issued from it. "Jack. One of your aliases. Circa twentieth through thirtieth centuries. Entirety: Captain Jack Harkness. 133rd Squadron. RAF."

Jack looked down at the wrist strap for a long moment, and then back up at Gwen. "Well, well. At least twenty centuries. You have come a ways to find me."

"I—I—." she stammered. She was at a loss. She had expected Jack to be angry to see her, maybe. To put her off, or ignore her. what she had not anticipated was that she would not be recognised at all.

"Identify."

"What?" Gwen said, in response to the return of the tinny voice that came from Jack's arm.

"Identify."

She swallowed, but it did not help the dryness that had overtaken her throat. The being sitting on the stool behind her moved, and she pushed herself up on the empty seat. "I'm Gwen Cooper," she said, without anything else to fall back on.

"Searching memories," the voice said. Then the strap began projecting images into the air, just as Gwen's had given her the map. Gwen watched them, as did Jack. His brows furrowed as she saw her own face in vAnious moods, lips moving with words that she couldn't hear—could he? As she watched, her own emotions ricocheted. There was confusion about whatever was going on with Jack, of course, but there were others evoked by the events she was seeing. There was her first day at Torchwood; relief flooding her as Jack led her through the crime scene tent. She became one of the team as the scenes flashed. The day in the shooting range made her blush even now; she could still feel his hands encircling her wrists.

So many moments flashed so quickly, like a photograph slideshow made for someone's mother on their birthday. She waited by Jack's prone form as he revived from Abadoon's attack. There was her wedding; there she was pulling him out of the rubble of John Hart's bombs. The scenes were peppered with others, and she felt remorse deeper than she had since Anwen's birth as Tosh, Owen and Ianto flickered in and out. Rhys featured too, and she wished she could have left a note for him. But she would be back before he noticed, after all, wouldn't she?

Eventually, it ended. The wrist strap beeped. "Identity confirmed," the voice said. Gwen thought it reminded her a little bit of C-3PO but wondered if that wasn't because this whole place seemed to be taken out of Star Wars. These thoughts were cut off, though, by Jack turning back to her. the grin he had worn upon first seeing her had come back, and there was no sign of the emotions that had coursed through her as the images flashed before them.

"You and I had quite a life, Gwen Cooper," he said. "Too bad I can't remember it."

She blinked. "But we just saw it all."

"Yeah," he said, leaning in to speak to her. He still smelled the same, she realized, her tired mind almost giddy with it. "It's pretty cool. I downloaded my memories onto the drive, and it can search them for me. I have so many—you know what I am, it said that—you've got to know how many lifetimes I've lived. There's a lot of emotion in all of those lifetimes. Too much. So I download it all on here, maybe every five years or so now. Short term memory is all that's worth anything anyway." His grinned widened, and he reached out to put a hand on her wrist. "Of course, I still have my memory for some things." His eyebrows waggled.

It's Jack, she thought, even as she knew it wasn't. Maybe he was somewhere in there, or in that machine, but this man sitting next to her wasn't him. She blinked rapidly to force back tears of rage. Why the hell would he do such a thing?

Unable to think properly with this shell of her friend sitting in front of her, grinning as he used to do whenever they ate ice cream on the Plass, she stood. "I'll come back," she assured, though she was mostly speaking to herself.

She walked away quickly, but in doing so she almost spilled someone's drink all over herself. In the commotion that followed this, she heard his call after her. "I'll look forward to it. Looks like we have unfinished business."

Knowing what he meant made her shudder. Her Jack had understood his place when she married Rhys. It didn't take knowing him half as well as she did to know that Jack without his memories would be a sex-obsessed cad.

Somehow she made it back up to her rooms. Anwen hadn't stirred. Gwen changed into soft pajamas that Kasha had provided, but she knew she wouldn't sleep. In her deepest heart, she knew that she didn't doubt that Jack would do such a things as this. He would numb pain if given the chance. He had so much of it, and he had done so before by burying himself in work, in them. Maybe one day making the connections just felt too hard. There must not have been anyone to tell him how stupid he was, and to make him see reason. No one to make him see the human side of things.

Well, luckily those were tasks Gwen Cooper was extraordinAnily good at. That thought combined with the jet-lag—time-lag?—allowed her to shift into an uneasy sleep.

***

"Rough night?" Kasha asked on Gwen's second morning in the fifty-first century—and how weird did that sound? She had sat down at the terminal they had prepared for her in the dark series of offices that held Torchwood, and been surprised to see that the screen was transmitting in a language that at least closely resembled twenty-first century English. There were some fairly obvious grammatical discrepancies, but Gwen understood it for the most part.

"I assume you met our Memory Man?" Kasha added.

"I—yeah," Gwen agreed. She managed to turn her eyes away from the display and face the other woman. Anwen cooed from the sling against Gwen's chest that she sat in. "I suppose I did. I was going to do research on him this morning—find out what I could about why he's like this… he wasn't always."

Kasha narrowed already-slanted eyes at her. "They say he used to gallivant through time. I suppose you know him from then?"

Gwen hesitated, biting her lip. She felt like Jack, suddenly, unsure of how much to give away until she knew what she was dealing with. She remembered that Jack had been properly from the 51st Century—was he in his own timeline now? If not, then would these people know what his timeline would do? Was it any of their business? She had no idea. So she shrugged. "I'm from the twenty-first century, properly," she offered. "And as such, I have no idea how your electronics work. Little help?"

She could tell that Kasha was shrewd enough to know that she was being put off, but hoped that she would know that Gwen had her reasons for it. As it was, she didn't react except to tilt her head towards the computer screen.

"I work how you tell me to, Gwen Cooper." The computer—terminal they called it—said. Gwen jumped, more than a little alarmed that the voice sounded so similar to the tiny one that had rang out from Jack's wrist-strap the night before. "I sync with your wrist-strap and your other devices, so that in time I will know you and your habits so that I can assist you in the best ways possible."

"Bit like a husband?" Gwen assessed with a laugh.

To her surprise, Kasha wrinkled her nose. "Goodness, you are three thousand years out of your time, aren't you? What an old-fashioned notion!"

"Don't you, er, have husbands?"

Kasha shrugged, waving her hand at the screen before them. "Terminal, explain," she said, "I have work to do." Then she left Gwen to her devices, apparently assuming that she was assimilated enough for now.

"People in the 51st century most often raise children with partners, but do not mate for life," the computer was telling her, in response to Kasha's command. "This shift has its roots in the 21st century, but did not take hold until the 40th century, when couples were often separated by long space-journeys that would take years for one spouse and days for another due to the complexities of light-speed travel." Pictures flashed on the screen, of 21st-century weddings, and 51st century families, encompassed usually it seemed of more than one adult. "Some still mate for life, but do not use the out-of-date terms such as 'husband' and 'wife'."

Gwen snorted. "Really? It takes space-travel to shut up the prudes? Well, that's a new one. Er… thanks, then. For that. Could you, um, tell me about Jack Harkness?"

There was a pause during which Anwen reached up to touch a finger against the face of the baby in the last picture.

"No record."

Gwen smacked herself in the forehead. "You wouldn't, would you? Right—tell me about the Memory Man."

Instantly an image of a grinning man—the Jack look-alike she had seen the night before—flashed onto the screen. "Un-Ja," Anwen said promptly.

"Not quite, darling," Gwen said, stroking her curls as the computer began to speak. "But we'll work on that, won't we?"

Once she had filled her head with knowledge of who Jack was in this century, she wanted immediately to confront him. The difficulty was that no one seemed to know where he could be located during the daytime. There were ways, the terminal informed her, based on GPS-like capabilities in wrist straps, but to do so for personal reasons was considered very gauche.

"Well then I suppose I mustn't, considering my goal is to fit in," Gwen mused once it told her this.

"That's correct."

Gwen startled and looked up; Kasha was back, holding a bag in one hand. "It's lunch. I thought I'd take you to one of the park-places. It will be familiar for the baby there, won't it?"

"Aye," Gwen agreed, standing up. "She could use some fresh air, as could I." She had put Ani down on the floor an hour or so before, engaged with the toddler toys Kasha had provided them the night before. She'd been relatively placid, but the finger sucking had started, and Gwen knew she was getting hungry. "Want to go eat in the park, darling?" Gwen asked, scooping her up.

"Plass?" The baby asked, her eyebrows raising.

Gwen laughed. "Maybe the soldiers are right, I do take you to work too much, don't I? Need to leave you with Daddy more often. We have child-care," she added to Kasha, who was walking next to them, and obviously listening to this exchange. "It's just that with my job being so sporadic and—and other things, we like her with us. She's a good girl, and there's always someone that stays behind when we go chasing after aliens. Not that—well, they don't like me doing the chasing these days, with her, but I think they've rather learned their lessons about that."

There was very little reaction from the other woman, so Gwen chose another tack. She didn't feel like spending however long she would be here with only a flirtatious Jack and infant Anwen to talk with. "What exactly does Torchwood do these days? That was my next question for the terminal."

They walked down a corridor, and Gwen was grateful not to have to be intently studying the map on her wrist. She let her companion lead them through a nearby door, and she nearly forgot that she had even asked a question in the face of where the door led. When she had been outside the day before, there had been no visible sun, much less blue sky. There had only been billowing smoke, and the grey facades of barely-visible buildings. But they now stood on the edge of a park that seemed to be formed of the brightest spring-day colours. Anwen began straining immediately to be let down. Gwen set her on the grass, and she crawled next to her mother as Kasha led them to a nearby bench. Once the adults were seated, Anwen pulled her way up Gwen's legs, coming to a standing position and grinning in delight, her face turned to the sun.

"It's not nice weather like this where we come from, is it Ani?" Gwen said, once she found her voice again. "The Cardiff skies are yucky these days."

"Mmm, our weather simulators are taking it easy today," Kasha commented, pulling food out of the bag she toted. "They like storms and snow occasionally, makes them seem powerful."

"Mother Nature feels the same way," Gwen commented, taking baby-food out of her own bag, along with a spoon. The consistency of the mashed stuff was the same as what she fed Ani at home, and she was lucky enough to have a toddler unconcerned with taste. And, really, whatever had been supplied in her kitchen smelled better than the mashed peas that were her usual fare. "But anyway, Torchwood?"

"Mmm," Kasha said swallowing. "There's a lot to it you may not get without time travel being invented in the 21st."

"You'd be surprised," Gwen muttered.

"Well, basically, with time travel being fairly easy to do for those who have access to the technology—and that's far more than you'd think—it's our job to keep track of things of—truths in a way, and make sure they're not being altered. It used to be, they say, that there was a whole race of people who did that, living outside time, but that's kids stories. Really it's us fighting pranksters, and people jumping into our timestream to cause trouble."

"Not that far away from us then," Gwen mused. "What about… well one phrase I came across during my research today was 'time agent'. What's that?" It was only a partial lie—their 'mystery man' was still connected to the term.

Kasha's face hardened. She folded up a wrapper that had been around the square of food she had eaten—it looked like a cross between a sandwich and a meat pie to Gwen—and tossed it into a tube nearby. There was a sucking sound and a crunch. Gwen hoped this was recycling, but suspected it might be trash compacting. Humans always collected waste, she was learning.

"They're rogues, aren't they? Give Torchwood a run for its money. They started out doing about the same things we did, but more hands on. They went out into the field to keep things right at specific time hotspots—events that people tried to change the look of over and over again. But their numbers began to dwindle. People paid 'em off, and a bunch of them saw that there was money to be made in all the time jumping. The way they conned people into keeping events the same became a way to on them into other things. Mostly they add more work for us so when we have to sort their mess out too."

"Yeah," Gwen said, thinking about the other time agent she'd encountered, aside from Jack. "Sounds about right."

Kasha went back to work soon after that, but Gwen stayed in the terraformed park watching Anwen crawl around after pigeons and squirrels—or their genetically-engineered counterparts, she imagined bitterly. The image was nice, the little girl playing along with 51st century toddlers, but there was something to it that rang false to Gwen. She was growing tired of lies and images.

That night she made her way to the bar without hesitating, even though she knew that this place was probably the ultimate land of falsehoods. Under the dim lights, who knew who you were, and with the lax standards the terminal had informed her of, who cared? Several people—be they men, women, or without gender—turned their eyes to her as she crossed the floor, but she kept her eyes on him.

When she sat down, he immediately turned and didn't seem at all surprised to see her. His long fingers wrapped tightly around the glass he held.

"They think you're thirty-seven here, don't they?" Gwen said. The bartender, a large alien with at least seven limbs that she could see eyed her, but when he realized that she was speaking to Jack he seemed to lose interest.

"You've done research," he stated, tipping back whatever was in his glass. He motioned to the bartender, and Gwen saw his thumb gesture towards her. It would be a subtle move to anyone not watching him closely. "You really want me."

"Lose the cocky grin, it doesn't suit you without something more to your character."

"I'm injured." He clutched at his chest. "Truly, deeply."

She rolled her eyes. "Look, save it for someone who has the time. I know what you're doing. It's six years after you and John Hart disappeared a few planets and two hundred years away from here. You turn back up, living with your memories in an armband, and they all think you're some kind of fallen hero—war hero, Face of Boe, Time Agent wronged by the corrupt Agency. They let you be the eccentric, and you do what you always wanted to do, live in your own century with no ties."

All of this came out very fast. They were the conclusions she had come to while watching Anwen grass-stain the romper that she had been provided. Judging by the now solemn-look he was giving her, this was about right.

"If you are right," he said, turning the new glass of liquid around and around between his palms. "Then what are you going to do to change that?"

"Well, I'm not sure yet. But I have a few ideas, just from looking at you now."

He shifted on his stool, resting one arm on the slick blue surface of the bar, and the other on his hip. "And what would those be?"

"First of all you're drinking water. You weren't last night. You're afraid of something, and the only possible vAniable is me. You shift to water when you want to be on the alert. Obviously you have enough fear to think I might convince you to do something you're not sure you want to do. I have hope. You had him serve me--," she paused and sniffed her own glass—"something very strong, meaning you hoped to take advantage and get information out of me, if nothing else. You're not unattached, at least not completely."

"Interesting observations," Jack said, tipping the contents of his water glass down his throat. "And what would you read into my doing this?" he demanded, reaching over and draining Gwen's glass as well. He flinched a little when he swallowed, and then turned to her defiantly.

She shrugged. "Not much, except that you might like to know that Alice has married a nice man who has a little girl. I ran into her in the Market last month, and it looked like there might be a bump, too."

"Alice, identify," Jack demanded of his wrist. As the images passed in front of him, Gwen saw a look of—disconcertion? pass over his face. "So, she's okay?" Jack asked, swallowing after the last image fell out of the air.

"You always wondered," offered the wrist-strap.

"I think so."

"So what are you going to do," he demanded, now looking at her with a hostile spark in his eyes. "Shove old memories in my face until I want them back?"

"Not quite," Gwen said, reaching over to thread her fingers through his. "Right now I'm going to dance with you."

He looked as confused as she expected him to as she led him onto the dance floor. The style of dance had, at least, not degenerated to having obvious sex on the dance floor the way it looked like it might in her time. She let him lead her in the gyrating motions of the dance, and she watched him. She knew he was trying to figure her out, but there wasn't much to figure out when she didn't quite know what she was doing herself.

What she knew was that Jack sometimes forgot that one could make a connection with someone, and that was more meaningful than flying by the seat of your pants. He had grown so afraid of putting people in danger once that she used to feel him slipping away in their Torchwood days. Often then Ianto brought him back. Now she would have to. Once she got past that step, then maybe she'd take the next one. It was a bit like the time she spent bent double, her fingers clutched in her tiny daughter's fists, supporting the dangerous crossing of the dining room floor.

Anwen wasn't walking on her own yet, and Gwen rather hoped she'd wake Jack up before she could.

***

He wasn't always there waiting for her. Some nights she made her way down the now-familiar corridorstreets to the bar only to find his usual barstool taken over by some other creature. The bartender would nod at her, but he knew she wasn't staying just as much as she did. After that first night, she drank juice while spending time with Jack—something she had to pay for, but which wouldn't make her tipsy.

Spending time with Jack. But what was she doing, really? She asked herself that often while lying asleep in her little room, listening to Anwen's breathing. Sometimes Kasha's questioning gaze asked her that when she gave Gwen some menial bit of filing to do for Torchwood—one that wouldn't send her back to the 21st knowing too much (she'd found out on her third day that some information had been blocked from her terminal. When she confronted the machine about this, it was as apologetic as a computer could be when it told her that their job was to control time-knowledge, after all.

There she was, on a tangent again. What was she doing? Meandering around a city three-thousand years away from Cardiff, from home, from her child's father. What did she want from this? Was she escaping the same way Jack had—away, away from the memories of a world she felt torn from, where her job was no longer her job? She felt, at times, as alien there as she did here and here there was—what?

There was Jack. But he wasn't her Jack. He wasn't weighed down by the past, but in the same way he wasn't the caring, empathetic man she had known. There was an edge to him that came, she supposed, from being unattached. Even more unattached than she was.

Did she envy that? She wondered, as she watched Anwen in the faux-park one afternoon. The toddler had pulled herself up on the green bench that Gwen sat on, and was pointing up at the sky. "Adar!" she cried.

"Iawn," Gwen murmured, looking down at the girl. At home, she spoke in English and Rhys generally spoke Welsh to the girl, unless he was reading an English book aloud. They'd found this the best way to help her learn both languages—something about which Rhys was surprisingly passionate—but without Rhys, Gwen was going it alone.

But she wouldn't trade Anwen, she knew that, she was her only source of light many days. And that was the difference, wasn't it? She wanted attachments. Jack no longer did. So that was going to be the trick, wasn't it? To make him want to stick around for something. But it didn't answer the question of what she wanted.

"Bore da! Bore da!" Anwen cooed, waving to the birds (fake birds? Genetically engineered birds?). _Those Welsh vowels_ Gwen thought, Jack's voice in her head. Escape was not her motivation, though she supposed it was a nice consequence. Jack was her motivation, even if it pained her to admit it.

If he had disappeared forever; if there had not been a woman with a vortex manipulator, then Gwen would have been okay. She would have missed him, that didn't change, but she wouldn't have pined. Given the choice, though, she would always choose to have Jack in her life. And for that she would have to catch him—get him out of the bar and actually into her life.

She smiled to herself as she began to think of a plan. What she needed to do was to play into his current desires—or what he thought his desires were. Hopefully, the past would take it from there.

That night, she plopped herself down next to Jack weAning not the uniform tunic-and-trousers outfit that Kasha had provided her with, but a low-cut dress that she had purchased with the Torchwood-sanctioned credits she was given through her "job". The fabric, whatever it was, formed well to her body, and she admitted to herself that she looked good even with the changes her pregnancy had wrought on her. Rhys would want her out of it in a half-second, and with luck so would Jack.

The appraising look he gave her when she sat down suggested that she'd been right about that. Her heart-rate sped up, and she clung to the glass the bartender set in front of her. One sniff of the bright green liquid informed her that he, too, had seen that this night would be different. The alcohol flooded her veins, and almost immediately after draining the glass she felt woozy. Best be careful, she thought, even as she agreed to a refill, she would be the one in charge tonight.

There was something to be said, she thought after her third drink, for short-term memory. What she and Jack had now was not weighed down by the trunks full of emotional baggage that they both usually carried. They chatted and teased, and she knew that it was superficial banter. It consisted more of mocking the other patrons who were contorting bizarrely on the dance floor. His sense of humour was still Jack. They didn't talk much after a while; instead, they sat companionably, their eyes meeting occasionally. When this happened, she found herself licking her lips unconsciously, her heart beginning to hammer. Not wanting to acknowledge what this meant, she distracted herself by sipping from her drink.

"You," she said after a while, poking a finger into his chest, "Would be some kind of study for all those sciencey people who want to know how memory is tied to personality."

"Oh believe me, they want me." He grinned as he said this, and she rolled her eyes.

"Always such a dirty boy," she sighed, shaking her head in mock disgust. She spun her glass around on the smooth bar-top. It had been emptied again, and she wasn't sure how many this was. Well, that wasn't part of the plan, but Kasha had Anwen, so it was all right, wasn't it?

Jack was stAning at her. She had paused for too long; let her face get too solemn or something. "What are you doing?" he asked, accusatory in his seriousness.

"Forgetting," she murmured, and then turned to slip her hand in his. "Or perhaps remembering something I should have forgotten."

Their hands grasped each other familiarly, and not from just the time they had passed together over the weeks. There was something deeper that she willed him to feel too. Her own feelings were on hyperdrive. Every time part of his body touched hers she felt a small shiver up her spine. _Control, control, control,_ she told herself. The trouble was that Jack was not concerned with keeping control at all. His hands found their way into her hair, and also onto her backside. She couldn't find the necessary facilities to swat him away.

They were moving to the beat of a song, which she could barely recognise as music, much less understand the words to, but none of that mattered. Nothing mattered except the hands in her hair, until an odd sound reached her ears. She concentrated for just a second. Jack's wrist strap was right against her ear, when it would have been otherwise unaudible in the din. "Warning. Out of character for Gwen Cooper."

She laughed to herself, and slid her hands over both of Jack's wrists, coyly, muffling the sound of the wrist strap. Jack was grinning, and he leaned down to kiss her forehead. Then his lips meandered down her jaw, and onto her lips. She wouldn't have had time to shove him away if she wanted to, and she didn't want to. Not this time. This time this was exactly her plan. She let his hands wander all over her body, and tried to keep her mind separate from this at the same time. It was all part of the mission, just another Torchwood job. The alcohol, and Jack's…. Jackness, were no more than the alien aphrodisiac she had encountered with Carys. She was still above herself somewhere, watching this happen with enough distance to guide their movements—wasn't she?

After an amount of time that she would never be able to quantify, Jack began moving her through the crowd, towards the door of the bar. They didn't speak about this, and she worked hard to keep the satisfied smile from her face. When they reached the corridor, she stumbled in the bright light. His arm immediately went around her chest, and her head swam for a minute. It was long enough for him to try and move her in the opposite direction from the lift that would take them to her flat.

"No," she said, too loudly. He stopped walking, and looked down at her with a furrowed brow. "I mean, my place, shall we? I've got something there for us." She smiled, hoping that it was a seductive smile, and not the nerves that she was feeling. A part of her wanted to let herself be led away to wherever Jack hid himself, to let him have his way with her. They were so far away from the world where their actions had consequences.

When she got them through the door of her flat, it was even more difficult. He propelled her with ease to the bed, and she tumbled backwards. Without being entirely sure of what she was doing, she found that her hands had found his braces and were sliding them off his shoulders. _Pretense, Gwen, Pretense._

Was it pretense to let him slide her dress off of her shoulders? Pretense when her mind was reeling, screaming that this was at once what she had wanted years ago, and yet so very wrong. The objections were losing out against his hand on her brest, and they shouldn't, they definitely shouldn't, but her dress was a red puddle on the ground and—

"WARNING, WARNING. Not in compliance with your understandings with _Gwen Cooper_ and _Rhys Williams_."

Jack stopped, lifting his tongue off of where it had been licking up the curve of her breasts, near her heart. It only took him a moment to look down at his wrist strap, and she knew that he would push the button that turned it off and continue what he was doing. The moment, though, was over for her, and she pushed up, wrapping the duvet around her as she did so.

"It's right," she said shakily, brushing her hair out of her eyes as she passed to the small kitchenette. "We shouldn't…. not like this. I'm married, and besides you're…. you're not you." Even as she said it, she wondered if that was what made the difference. It shouldn't be. It definitely shouldn't be. Rhys was her husband and she had long ago decided that she would be loyal to Rhys.

One day she would have to tell him about this. That thought made her a touch more liberal with the wine she was pouring. There wasn't anything unusual about the wine, unlike nearly everything she encountered in this time. Somehow making grapes into alcohol had made its way through the first three thousand, and didn't abate in the second.

She handed him his glass and sat down on the bed next to him. "Here's to things past," she said raising her glass.

"Oh I think I prefer things present," he replied, his hand on her leg again. She should have pushed him away, but she knew that this time there was a time limit for their interactions. He leaned close to her, so that his wine-scented breath tickled the side of her neck. "I know what's in this," he said. "'m a former conman, and a Time Agent. I didn't erase my common sense."

"But you drank it," she countered, reaching out for his glass as he began to sink down onto the bed.

"Yeah, well, one thing hasn't changed," he said, his voice beginning to slow.

"What's that?" Gwen asked, looking over her shoulder at him. His eyelids were closing, though he fought sleep in the same way that Anwen did after a bottle. With longer and longer gaps between reopening his eyes.

"You fascinate me," he replied, with a grin. The half-mast position of his eyelids gave him a more thoughtful appearance, one that reminded her more of the Jack she used to know. As she thought this, he began to lose the battle. When she believed that his eyes were going to stay closed, she grabbed his hand with the hand that did not hold the glasses. To her surprise, his fingers clenched around hers for a long moment before he relaxed into sleep.

She sat there for another minute, and then looked down at the wineglasses. She downed the contents of one, letting her head begin to swim again as she changed into pyjamas. Jack began to snore as she puttered unsteadily around, making herself a bed on the couch, swallowing the pill Kasha gave her to prevent a hangover with another sip of wine. Eventually she settled onto the couch and turned the lights out with her own wristband.

What did she know? She knew that he still had some… connections with his past, even if he didn't have exact memories. He knew that she had spiked his wine through, he said, experience. There was body memory that couldn't be explained, and though she knew she'd never be able to prove it, Gwen felt that the connection he had with her was not new. He reacted in too many of the same ways, tilted her head up to kiss her in the same manner, examined her thoughtfully with the same glimmer in his eyes.

He was Jack; she knew it. So it was up to her to make him want to be himself again. With a thoughtful sigh she programmed her wrist strap to lock the door from the inside, and block the signal from Jack's wrist strap. As she typed on it, she had a sudden wish that it could send messages home. How she longed to send Martha Jones a text that said _"Jack Harkness is in my bed"_.

***   
"Tad!" Anwen exclaimed early the next morning.

Gwen had awoken to Kasha's knocking on the door, and opened it to take the baby from her. She had attempted to stand in the doorway so that her colleague couldn't stay in, but Kasha was not to be deterred, and Gwen supposed she did owe her for taking care of the baby, so she let see past her into the bedroom.

Kasha let out a low whistle of approval. "You captured the Memory Man," she said. It rather sounded akin to capturing the manticore, or some other creature of legend, and Gwen supposed to these people it was.

"Oh please. He'll go to anyone's bed," Gwen said. She turned red when she realized what she was implying, but Kasha didn't flinch.

"Oh, he sleeps with them, but never in their bed. Always takes people back to his tiny little place, or else does 'em somewhere a bit more public than that." She clicked her tongue and grinned.

Gwen smiled tautly back, and after a few more minutes got Kasha out of the flat. She had resettled with Anwen on the sofa, and began their ritual. She had had her mobile in her pocket when they had been transplanted out of the twenty-first century. It didn't work of course, but Kasha had found a way to keep its power going when she asked, because saved on it were photos of people back home, people important to both her and Anwen.

It was a picture of Rhys that had made her exclaim. "Tad!" she said again, pointing so that her finger made a print on the screen of the phone.

"Don't tell me I'm that kid's father." Gwen looked up to see that Jack was awake, still lying on the bed with one hand propping up his head.

"D'you speak Welsh now? You didn't even speak it when you lived in Cardiff," Gwen argued, trying to seem uninterested in him.

"For your information," Jack said, sitting up with a groan. "It's not exactly an unusual word for 'father'. You pick up limguistic things like that when you've travelled." At the skeptical look she gave him, he added, "Language, my dear kidnapper, is not stored in the same part of the brain as event-memory."

"I'm not your kidnapper. I'm your captor," she countered. "But not for long. I just wanted to speak with you somewhere private."

Neither of them had been looking at the baby while they conversed, but halfway through Gwen's last word she began squirming violently to get off of her mother's lap. She stood on the floor for a minute, bouncing with such excitement that her whole body was vibrating. Then with a simply stated: "Un-Ja!" she dove across the floor.

It was, properly, a lunge towards Jack, but the distance between them was too much for this to cover the distance, so halfway there she had to put one foot in front of the other. Then she did it again. Gwen stared, mouth still open, as her daughter took her first steps walking towards Jack Harkness.

To his credit, Jack held his arms out for this baby, who was more unfamiliar to him now than she was before she was born. She grabbed onto him as soon as she could reach and tumbled into them to cover the last part of the distance. "Un-Ja!" she repeated contentedly, grinning toothily up at him, and then turning to give her mother an aren't I clever? look.

"She's…she's never done that before." Gwen swallowed. "I mean… walked. She's never walked before."

"Well aren't you a big girl?" Jack said, lifting Anwen up onto the bed. "What's your name?"

"Anee," the baby offered. She took one of Jack's fingers in her hand and began moving it up and down.

Gwen laughed. "It's Anwen," she said, "And she's shaking hands. What a clever little blighter you are," she said to the baby, who was snuggling up next to Jack, obviously beyond pleased with herself.

There was a minute of silence until Jack turned back to Gwen. "She knows me," he said.

"Yeah. She's seen pictures. See?" she added, flipping through the pictures on her phone until she saw one of the oldest ones. "It's you and Ianto, oh ages ago. I couldn't delete it. She's seen it countless times. And that's her dad," she added, moving onto another picture. "That's come in handy here."

"Why?" he asked, his expression so genuinely curious that she was taken aback.

"For her. So she'd remember him properly. It wouldn't be any good to go home and her not recognise her own dad."

"Are you going home?" he asked, still with that unconcerned curiosity.

"Well, I expect so." _Once you get your memory back and agree to come too. Or fix my vortex manipulator to send me home._ She hated to add that this was a possible outcome, and one reason for at least befriending him. "And even if we don't she shouldn't forget her dad."

"But he's not here. Wouldn't it hurt her to only see pictures of someone so far away? I mean showing her pictures of me; she was never going to see me as far as you knew, right? You said you didn't expect to come here."

Ah. So they were going to get into this sooner than she had expected. Well, it was what she had lured him here for after all, wasn't it. "I didn't. I hoped you'd come back, but I had no way of knowing if you would." She closed the phone and began tapping it nervously against her leg.

"But Jack, you were so important to me that I couldn't let my daughter not know who you were. In many ways, you were still a living presence in my life." She blushed as she said this. It sounded so... so _Gwen_ of her. She wished he had the awareness to laugh at her sentimentality, and cut her off. Instead she was left to ramble, looking everywhere except at him. "Without you I wouldn't have my job, my knowledge about the world. A lot of horrible things wouldn't have happened, but so much of what you gave me was so grand that I could never regret having met you.

"My daughter is a part of all of that. When I found out I was pregnant with her, it was during one of the hardest times we ever faced. It broke you; it broke all of us, but she was my hope after it. Things were dark in Cardiff, you were off traveling, but I had her. Also, I had the memory of you—of us. Of what it felt like to know that we were entrusted with such power. In our way we saved the world once a week—or at least Cardiff and that was my world. And you… you were my… you were _Jack_."

The word was almost a prayer, a hope that when she said that it would revive him. She finally made herself meet his eyes, imploring a response. There was none, except for Anwen, who was chattering to herself as she moved Jack's hand up and down. Gwen sighed. "Look... I know you can't know what that meant, but it meant that not telling my daughter about you would be like not introducing her to her own grandmother." _Well my mum, not Rhys's._

"A person doesn't disappear when they leave. There are traces of them everywhere. Memory, images, influences. Why shouldn't we harness that and use it for good?"

He had watched her steadily through her speech. This made her keep her eyes on him too, though they wanted to dart around the room. His gaze was unyielding, and she had no idea what he was thinking. Anidane, too, was focused on her mother, her hand still firmly gripping Jack's finger. When she finally finished, he shook his head, just once, but something fierce flickered in his eye.

"People leave pain," he countered. "That's all memory is. It's pain. Sure, there are good times, but then they all get tinged with something negative—pain, death, guilt, regret. The light doesn't last if you hold on to the dark."

Her plan had been to keep calm while speaking to them, try to treat him like a wounded man, because he was in a way. Instead, she scoffed. "You don't think I thought that when you first left? I was angry. Rhys actually fought me to keep me from burning the pictures of you I had left. It used to be that you were the one left, Jack, but that time it was me. Owen, Tosh, Ianto and then you. Only Gwen left." She pointed at herself fiercely, mobile phone clattering on the phone.

"Believe me I know you had it on a much larger scale. But I know some of what it's like. And when this little one was born I thought of how much you'd love her. That made me smile, Jack, and I knew. I knew that my anger wouldn't hurt you; it would only hurt me. My sorrow at Ianto's death wouldn't bring him back, but in a way the happy memories would.

"There's so much to reclaim if you fight for it, Jack."

Again he shook his head. "Was. Maybe once. But I've lived so many lifetimes, reclaiming one isn't worth it. I may have known you once. Maybe once I even loved you, huh? But for me that was three thousand years ago."

"It was for me to, in a way. Time's relative, isn't it? But I'm not talking about a lifetime, Jack. I'm talking about a life. People, a place. Things to call your own. Something that makes existence more than just waking up from one morning to the next."

He stood up, and her heart began hammering. She was going to lose this one.

"I don't need a reason," he commented as he crossed the room. "Do you know why people hang onto those things? Because that's their reason for not dying. Since it's not like I can do that, there's really no point to me hanging on."

"Who are you?" she burst out, standing up to be on his level. "What kind of heartless person…?"

He held up a finger, reaching out to put it on her lips. "Ah, see there it is," he murmured. "I haven't got one of those. Emotion and memory go hand in hand, you see. Heartlessness is something I've worked very hard to perfect."

He was gone before she could formulate a response to that. She stared at the closed door, wishing she had thought to lock it from the inside again. For a long time she stood there, considering racing after him, considering her next move, wishing that she'd done something different.

"Un-Ja?" Anwen finally asked, breaking the silence.

"No, darling," Gwen replied, sinking down onto the sofa. "I'm not sure who that is, but he's not your Uncle Jack. "

***

"What if I told you that I knew where to find him?"

Gwen started. She was sitting at the familiar bar on the third night since her argument with Jack. Well, discussion, or whatever it was. The first night she hadn't gone, because she didn't have a plan. She had no idea what to do now, or how to get him to see reason. But the second night she had gone, because what choice did she have? When he wasn't there, she began to get worried. A part of her had given up on expecting him to want to regain his memories. No matter what a strange woman had said on the side of the Bay, he was beyond her help. But she still needed him to fix the vortex manipulator so that she could get home.

The other part of her knew that if she went home unsuccessful she would always wonder. And so she would have to try again.

So she kept coming to the bar, even though he wasn't there on the third night either. The bartender gave her a lock that she suspected was one of sympathy as he gave her a glass of juice. She commence staring into it, as though it might reveal Jack's secrets. For about a second she thought it had. Then she sat up and looked to her left.

It wasn't her bright orange juice that had spoken, but the identity of the speaker startled her about as much as that would have. Captain John Hart was perched on the stool next to her.

"It only needed you," she sighed, suddenly wishing that her juice were alcoholic.

"It usually does." He smirked, and ran his hand through his hair. It had thinned out since the last time she saw him, and his face was drawn. He wore the same coat, though, and she wondered briefly if he had planned that so that she would recognise him. As if she could forget this arrogant berk. "So, what if I told you where he was?"

"Then I suppose I'd go after him so that he could get me out of here. I'm just going to assume you know all about the vortex manipulator stuff, because usually you lot know far more than I do. Mere mortal that I am."

"We're all mere mortals to him," Hart replied. She was surprised at the note of bitterness in his voice. Surprised enough to turn to him slightly, losing some of her hostility. "But, yes, I do know that you're stranded here with a broken vortex manipulator. It's why I'm here. Give me your arm."

"Why?" she asked, moving her wrist behind her back.

"So suspicious, Gwen Cooper. I'm on your side this time. Give me your wrist."

"Do you even know what my side is?" she demanded, allowing him access to the wrist strap all the same. "Because I don't."

"Well, to be honest, I'm not sure myself. Give me a minute."

He began punching buttons on the wriststrap. She thought to stop him, but she didn't. the fact that he had been attempting to help them all along during that awful encounter with Jack's brother made her think that maybe he was, in a twisted way, trustworthy. If nothing else, he was devoted to Jack. After all, how would Gray have enslaved him if he hadn't gone looking for his friend's brother. She had put that together, even if Jack hadn't.

"So what's that then?" she asked, when he looked up at her. "That'll take me to him or something, so that I can finish the job?"

"Nope," he replied, sitting back and reaching out for her drink.

"It's--." She began, but too late, he had thrown back the contents of the glass and made a face. "I've a baby," she explained when he looked incredulously at her.

"Didn't stop you last night."

"How did you—never mind. Special circumstances. So this won't take me to Jack," she added, nodding to the wrist strap.

"Nope." He handed her a folded piece of paper. "These are the coordinates of where he's gone. Programmed in there are the necessary details to get you back to Cardiff, to your time. Well, give or take. You've been here a couple of weeks; baby will have grown. But only a few weeks' difference."

Gwen took the paper, guiltily wishing she had had the chance to leave a note for Rhys. "So I could go get my daughter and leave now?"

"You could," he agreed. "But you won't." He grinned in the self-assured way of his that made her pulse quicken with something a little to the left of hatred, a little closer to passion.

"Why won't I?"

"Because then I wouldn't be able to tell you why he's like this."

Her eyes narrowed. "Bit convenient isn't it? That you know that?"

"Not convenient, unfortunate. Thing is, it was my fault, in a way. If I hadn't said anything… well, he wouldn't have gone."

"What are you talking about, Hart?" She demanded, narrowing her eyes at him. "If you think being enigmatic and vague is appealing to me, I'll have you know your former partner has given me enough of that."

"Straight-forward. I'd forgotten that about you." He sighed, resting his elbows on the bar and templing his fingers. "Your Jack and I were partners once, you've got that right. I know you were part of his team; his band of merry-men, but you were never his partner. There's things you learn about a person, codes you speak. We left signs for one another, once upon a time. Even when we separated we kept some of them up for just in case. The names thing, for one. JH. John Hart, Jack Harkness… so I found him on a jaunt to the forty-eighth century. He was doing all right, I suppose. Had bounced around time a bit, traveled some with that Doctor friend of his… but there was something unsettled. He didn't belong there—maybe not really, maybe not yet.

"I told him to get his sorry arse back to Cardiff. I knew he had unfinished business there."

"But he--."

John held up a hand and touched her lips with his fingers. She recoiled, remembering both the last time part of him had touched her mouth, and the heat of the last man who had touched her lips. "Let me finish. He told me I was insane, of course. Told me that he couldn't just pop up back in Cardiff after all of the damage he'd caused. So I… well, I conned him.

"He wasn't as quick on the uptake as he used to be—he didn't realize that I was remotely sending coordinates to his Manipulator until I was midway through. But instead of stopping me, he suddenly decided to take my advice." He banged his fist down on the table, and Gwen jumped. "Damn idiot. Why then of all times?"

"I don't understand. Why was it bad for him to go to Cardiff?"

"Because I wasn't done setting his coordinates. I sent him to Cardiff in 2018."

"And?" Gwen said, frightened of what he might say next. What made 2018 any different from him showing up in 2011?

"Well… this is difficult to explain in a 21st century framework of the understanding of Time."

"I've been working with Torchwood here, and I know Jack Harkness. I think that gives me more than a 21st century understanding of Time," Gwen countered.

"Have I ever mentioned how much I enjoy your sass? Anyway…. Time doesn't work in a strict cause-and-effect line, or even a 'everything that will happen has happened' frame, the way some 21st centurites think. It's more that some events are fixed, some are malleable, and some are somewhere in between. The trouble is, very few people know which are which. There are probably twenty people out there right now trying to assassinate Adolf Hitler, but his influence is fixed.

"Jack returning to Cardiff in 2011 isn't fixed. When some events go right, he does, but sometimes when time is in flux, he doesn't."

Gwen squinted at him, trying to put all of this together in her mind. River Song had said when she left that night that as of that night Gwen had succeeded. So right then, Jack had gone back in 2011, but not before that. It wasn't guaranteed. It made sense, if you didn't think to hard about it, because she hadn't actually done it yet—there was still a chance he wouldn't return. Time tossed the coin millions of times, and sometimes it landed on heads.

Or something like that.

"So when you sent him to 2018," she said, slowly. "He hadn't come back. So what?"

John opened his mouth, but hesitated. He eyed her up and down, sizing her up, but it wasn't the sexual sizing-up she was used to from him. "Come on then," she insisted. "I've got to know, don't I?"

"You do," he agreed. "Well, when he got to Cardiff it was a mess. I followed him as soon as I figured out the fucked-up coordinates I'd given him. It was a bombed-out city. The Rift, it seems, exploded around 2015. There were soldiers on the street, people with all kinds of mutations. Seeing it, seeing the devastation… well it broke Jack's heart, I think."

Gwen swallowed, and blinked rapidly. Visions of a decimated Cardiff flashed through her brain. His description didn't surprise her. Some days it seemed as though they were a sneeze away from martial law. Rift spikes were tiny or they were colossal, and her own voice held less and less weight…. her own voice.

"Did Jack,--." She paused, swallowing again. Her throat had gone sandpaper dry, and she wished he hadn't finished off her juice. "Well, I assume he looked for…. Torchwood."

"He did look for you. You'd… left."

She gave him a piercing look. "Died?" she demanded. "Tell me."

"No." he said. She expected denial, but she also expected it to be the quick no of an untruth, coupled with an avoidance of her gaze. A no that meant _yes, but even I don't want to tell you that._ This no was solid, truthful. "You'd been moved to London by some official to work on sorting out the Cardiff disaster from there. The thing is, I didn't find that out until I went back to do some snooping. Jack had already disappeared by then, and when I found him again he was… well, the way he is now."

Gwen nodded. She stared down at the folded paper in her hand, the one that would tell her where Jack was. Knowing that she survived whatever happened to Cardiff almost made her want to be defeated, to return to her city and her husband and deal with the consequences. This was all too complicated for a girl from Swansea who had only wanted to help people. Wasn't it Jack who had taught her that some people were beyond her help?

One thing kept nagging at her. "Why are we so special? Why is Cardiff so special? I mean, Jack's lived so many places, so many lives. Why does Cardiff have so much effect on him?"

John shrugged. "That I don't know. I think it has something to do with how invested he was in the place. The Jack I knew didn't invest himself in much. I guess he was invested in his search for Gray, but even I only knew that after years of bouncing through time with him. He didn't connect to people, things or aliens. He traveled, he smiled and they swooned. But he wouldn't leave Cardiff, not even for me, and I was the closest thing he had to family for most of his life."

He turned to her, head tilted. "I can't say why, Gwen Cooper. But I've seen that your Cardiff is the only thing that can break Jack. Maybe it's the only thing that can fix it too." He reached out and put a hand on hers. "You have a choice. You can push a button, go home, and hope that Time rights itself anyway, and Jack pops up. Maybe you can hope that he doesn't. Or you can follow him and keep fighting. Fight for Jack, the way everyone that loves him does, whether they know why or not."

Again she found herself stAning into his eyes. There was something in them that she had never seen before, a spark of cAning. For a second he reminded her painfully of Jack. The connection between them was broken, though, by a cry coming from the speaker of Gwen's wrist strap. Anwen had woken up. She never did before, but she'd been clingy for the past two days.

"I need to go," Gwen said, sliding off of the stool.

"I'll see you again," John Hart said, raising a hand in parting. Gwen didn't bother to demand a date, or to contradict him. He had a way of turning up.

When she arrived back in the flat, she picked up the still-fussing Anwen and brought her into her own bed. With one arm around her daughter she unfolded the paper. The words were written in a careful script, as though they had been copied by someone not familiar with the alphabet.   
_  
Boeshane Peninsula. Boeshane System. Sun A4-34. Meganya Cluster.  
_  
The next day, she presented herself early at Kasha's desk, explaining that she needed place on the next transport that could get her there, no matter what the cost.

John Hart had been right. To love Jack was to fight for him. Maybe that was even part of the definition of love, a need to protect and preserve the beloved. It was what had broken Jack, because his need, like his love, was so big. For the same reason, it would be her way of healing him, or that was her hope.

Her hope, like her love, was unyielding, but it was also as battered as the spacecraft she boarded to follow Jack to another galaxy.

***

There was sand everywhere, even in Anwen's hair --and Gwen was fairly certain that Jack was somehow the inspiration for Luke fucking Skywalker. George Lucas's heat of Tatooine had nothing on this sandy planet.

Okay, so the sea was quite nice, she admitted, looking at the sea from the window of the small pub where she had stopped to get her bearings. But the rest of it, well the future could have it. Worse was that she had realized upon disembarking from their three day space journey that she had no idea of how to track Jack down. Hart hadn't given her exact GPS coordinates to zoom into his local, after all, and with Jack that's what one generally needed. She was doomed to go round with her three thousand year old mobile playing 'have you seen this nutter?'. To psych herself up for that, she had decided to feed herself and Anwen before she began questioning tourists.

She found that if you didn't think too hard about what was in the meal that her translation program considered 'seafood special', it didn't taste too bad. It was less processed than what they served in the canteens at any rate. Anwen was enjoying the fruit mush the waitress had suggested. Gwen was wiping the sticky goop off of the girl's face when she overheard a snippet of conversation from behind her.

"Seen the Face of Boe down on the beach, didn't I Gracie?"

"You never did! He ain't been 'round since the last time the Academy recruited down here. Not with his poor mum gone."

"Aye, but it were him, starnin' out at the ocean all pensive like."

"Well, you know they say he ain't quite right in the head these days. O'course I don't believe that! Not our boy! He withstood all that the First Settlers did and didn't bat an eye!"

"Quite right!"

Gwen's ears strained as she listened to them. As they spoke she realized that they could have been seated in any pub or café in Cardiff. Perhaps parts of the city reminded Jack of home and that's what attached him so deeply to it. Places, it seemed, imprinted themselves on Jack. After all, here he was in Boeshane, a place that he supposedly had no memories of. Well, at least she now had an idea of where to find him.

She scooped Anwen up and sauntered over to the table where the two gossiping ladies sat. "Scuse me," she said, hefting Anwen up higher on her hip. "But did I hear you say you saw the Face of Boe? It's just that he's an old friend of mine. Was with my husband at…er… the Academy. I'd love to say hello and introduce him to Ani here."

She grinned dopily, hoping that Anwen's big eyes would do the convincing for her. Both women stared at her. "Well, I can't say I'd be willing to let someone gawp at him, but as you're an old friend, I'll tell you. He's out by the ruins of the first settlement, a mile or so north of here." the woman who had first spoken said.

"Oh lovely, thank you!" Gwen replied, and she was off before any of her more conspicuous differences could rear their heads.

She traipsed down the boardwalk, her progress slowed when Anwen insisted on being put down on the ground. Gwen half-hunched over to let her hand be held by tiny fingers. Her eyes were focused on the seaside, waiting for the sight of Jack. It didn't take long for them to find him. He never quite managed inconspicuous. It was usually the huge coat that did it. Gwen wondered if he had body heat issues. Something she should've asked Ianto about, once upon a time.

They left the boardwalk when his back was directly in front of them, and Gwen scooped Anwen back up. It was more to quicken their pace than anything; she didn't doubt that sand was already infiltrating the baby's shoes.

"It's so different now," he said before she'd announced her presence. "When I lived here it was just us out there." He gestured to the destroyed remains of a castle-like collection of buildings. "My parents were part of the first expedition to this planet. We were at war then, the human race against the most despicable creatures you can imagine. They'd made a base on the other side of the planet without our knowing.

"The worst of it was that we were a peaceful people. The expedition was full of families who wanted to keep their children out of the war. Boeshane was to be their refuge. Their utopia. Soldiers came after the first attack and drove the enemy out, but they had their taste of it. Boeshane would be under attack for another twenty years. And then it was over, and it became this. A tourist hotspot. Not," he finished, finally turning to her, "what my parents wanted either. That's not exactly peaceful." He pointed north where a mass of children was running around an old-fashioned funfair.

"You remember all of this?" Gwen asked carefully, taking a single step forward.

He lifted a corner of his mouth, building an expression somewhere between a smirk and a smile. "Funny thing is that I do. See, transferring my memories into this," he tapped his wrist strap, "caused some interesting side effects. I began to remember other things. It's only recently that I saw what it all meant. Did I ever tell you that the Time Agency stole two years of my memories?"

She shook her head at this seeming non-sequitur. "Nope. Must have been one of your other attractive sidekicks."

"Maybe it was. We could look it up if we felt like it. Well, anyway, they did after one antic too many on my part. Thing is, I thought they stole two solid years from me. After all, I woke up two years after I'd fallen asleep, and the agent who was with me implied as much. As it turns out, their equipment was far more sophisticated than that." He turned to her fully, completely facing her. His mouth was set in a firm line now, brows close together. "Can you guess what they did?"

"No," Gwen murmured. The wind off the sea was whipping her hair round her face, and she was reminded of a time when they would stand by the water and talk. Never then had Jack's eyes been so mutinous, or his voice so bitter.

"They picked and chose. They emptied out two years worth of happy memories from my childhood, and then dumped me two years in the future. It took me a long time to piece it together. After all, I distanced myself from my childhood memories, and it was the dark ones that I relieved when I delved into them. I didn't even know they were missing for centuries, and not how many until I was downloading on to this."

His mouth turned upwards, in a grin, but a slightly unhinged one. "I told you the other day that memory wasn't important, but I lied. It's my memory that's what I want, because it's what I can't have. Or couldn't have. But now I can, and you're going to help me get it back."

"Am I?"

"You are. This thing," he gestured to his wrist again, "Can do more than just extract memories. It can copy them. What's going to happen is that you're going to give me that handy vortex manipulator on your wrist and I'll go back to my childhood. I'll borrow the memories from my twelve-year-old self. My collection will be complete."

"And why would I do that?" Gwen said carefully. She was walking on uneven ground here, she knew, and she tried to approach him the way one might a flighty suspect. She might have him where she wanted him, but she could only guess where he was going, really.

"Because it will get you what you want. I've never known myself with all of my memories. If I retrieve these, then I'll download them all back. I'll reconstruct my memory. That's what you wan't isn't it? The chance that I'll become your Jack again with my memories? And who knows? Maybe with the missing years I'll be an even better Jack. You'll do it, because otherwise you'll always wonder. Oh, I may not remember you, Gwen Cooper, but I know you."

The satisfied glimmer in his eye made her want to resist. There was danger in this; danger that this man was truer to the true Jack. The danger that the centuries he had lived after he met her would have changed him beyond recognition anyway. More than that there were questions. If he couldn't remember anything, then why was he so obsessed with reclaiming what he couldn't remember being taken? Was it control? Something else? Something she wouldn't understand?

She didn't know. What she did know is that none of it mattered just then. She knew she'd do it, just as John Hart had known that she would take the dierctions he gave her. it was in what made her Gwen.

"How can I trust you'll come back?" she asked, setting Anwen down to detached the wrist strap from her wrist.

"You can't," he asserted. "You can only trust that I'll remember what it's like to be stranded without a vortex manipulator and hope that I'll retrieve you." He smirked. "And if I don't, well, Boeshane's not a bad place to grow up."

"I see why you and Hart got on so well," Gwen muttered, but she put the wrist strap into his waiting hand. To her surprise he switched it with his own. "Wouldn't want you to be lost without translation," he explained once she had fastened it to her wrist. "What's this?" he examined the Manipulator. "Set to Cardiff. So you didn't need me to get home."

He looked up at her, his eyes changing. Maybe he was seeing something in her he hadn't seen before, or maybe he was putting together the pieces. She found she didn't care. She was to eager to get on with things, to see what her fate would be.

"All right then, get on with it."

He nodded, and began pressing buttons. "I'll come back," he said firmly, before he disappeared. "I'll need someone to help me through the memory revival. I've heard it's painful. Meet me back at your flat. Three days. I'll be there."

She scowled at the suggestion that she would help him without question, and plopped down on the sand next to Ani when she realized it was true.

***

They reversed their journey. Another three days aboard a ship, pretending to blend in with the other travellers. Gwen lay awake at night wondering if he would be there. This could easily have been a con. She knew enough to assume that once this man was far more like John Hart than the Captain Jack she knew. Still, it wasn't all that different from their trip to Boeshane, when she had lain awake wondering if they would find him.

As it turned out, she needn't have worried. This version of Jack still kept his word. He was there, sitting slumped on her sofa when she entered the small flat. She put the squirming Anwen on the floor, and closed the door.

"So," she said.

He lifted his eyes to her. They were no longer pools of hedonism. There were flecks of pain, flecks of sorrow swimming around in the deep blue. His hands clutched at his hair, and his lips were firmly pressed together. It was as she suspected, Jack's memories of pain started at an early age. Without another word, she sat down next to him and put her arm around his shoulders. Her other hand clutched his arm, anchoring him through the storm that was to come.

They came back slowly, jaggedly. The memories, it seemed, didn't upload at a steady pace. There were hours when he was fine, helping her fix the food for meals, playing with Anwen, and then he would stop. His face would blank for a second as his system rebooted. It was gambler's chance what he would next look like. Sometimes he grinned, eyes dancing as pleasant memories reappeared, but often his face grew dark and he would retreat deep within himself.

The thing of it was, this relieved her in a way. She'd always imagined there was a far broodier side to Jack than she'd ever seen. Ianto had hinted at it, and didn't one have to have a dark side working for Torchwood for that long? Jack had one, obviously, but his façade of easygoing badassary hid a multitude of emotions.

Now there were times when he would look up at her with raw emotion on his face, fear sometimes, and pain. He never explained directly what the memories were, not for the first days when it was clear that she did not play a part in them. Still she sat with him, guiding him through a flashback of his life. She thought it interesting that usually one saw their lives flash before their eyes, but for Jack this was happening before rebirth.

She thought she'd say that to him once his personality was a little bit more recognisable.

On the third day he looked up at the dinner table and said, "I wonder if the banana factory is there yet?" She didn't know that that was the onset of the appearance of 'her Jack', because there was still another century before she turned up in his life.

It was tiring staying up at night to soothe the dreams of a man whose eyes still barely recognized her. He was good with Ani, letting her climb all over Unca Jack. This gave Gwen hope, but when their eyes met over the baby's head there was a blanket of awkwardness that covered them both. It was akin to dancing with someone who was heAning a different song in their head.

They were sitting in the park when it happened. Anwen was chasing down a pigeon. Gwen's eyes were fixed on her daughter. Though Jack was sitting next to her, he had blanked out five minutes before. These spells varied in length, but usually they lasted about a quarter hour, so Gwen was startled when she heard his voice.

She was more startled when he said the words: "Oh Gwen Cooper, you are fabulous, aren't you?"

The sun—for in this moment it seemed more like the actual sun to her than it ever had—lit up his eyes. His grin was cocky and knowing. Her mouth opened and closed in a close imitation of a beached fish while she tried to figure out what the correct reaction to this was. Slapping him was probably incorrect, so she clenched her fists tightly. A smile broke the last of the ice she had carried around since finding him at that bar weeks ago.

"Jack," she breathed. "It's you."

"It's me," he agreed.

"Mama?" They both looked down at Anwen, who was holding a crushed flower up for Gwen's inspection. Gwen took it appreciatively.

When she met Jack's eyes again, he asked: "So when does this beauty come around?"

Her smile faltered. If he remembered her, then there was a lot more that both of them were about to remember.

Later, she wouldn't be able to say if it was easier or harder because the memories returned in quick succession. Gray, the deaths of Tosh and Owen, the 456; they all appeared within a matter of hours. And even though he had only begun to process Ianto and Steven's deaths before another wave of memory passed over him, the look of self-loathing in his eyes was one she had seen before and would not forget.

"I'm such an idiot," he said that night. The bed creaked as he sat down on the end of it. Fifty-first century and the beds still creaked.

"Occasionally," Gwen said, stretching out on the bed. Anwen was still awake next to her, though barely, and Gwen ran her fingers through her daughter's hair. "To what are you referring exactly?"

"Leaving." He sighed. "Yeah, okay, I definitely needed time off. We all did, but… I never went back."

"Define never. You just haven't yet." Gwen toyed with the edge of her duvet. "It's odd, isn't it? I thought you'd, you know, go through the same emotions or whatnot. It's the same events, filtered through the same person."

"Yeah." He bit his lip pensively. "The thing is, it's not like I'm experiencing things for the first time. They're properly memories—distant and half-formed like memories are. They're in the state they were when I uploaded them, which in some cases is pretty decomposed. It's like…" he paused, staring down at the duvet for a long moment. "It's like when something major happens to you, and months later something reminds you of that. For just a minute you're there, the same emotions whipping through your head. When you come out of it, you're confused for a minute, still feeling all that, but then you realise that the time has passed and there's nothing you can do.

"And now the memories from when I was a kid are some of the clearest, maybe that puts me in a better mood." He flashed a grin. It was the first time he'd mentioned the fruits of his plan. "Or maybe its realising what an asset you were. I left for many reasons, but one of them was thinking I was protecting you from me. I didn't realize how much I risked damaging myself by doing that."

She nodded, slowly, turning this over in her mind. It was a relief to know that Jack wasn't going to lash out at her now, decide to abandon her again once he'd remembered his own helplessness and sacrifice to the 456. The knowledge that this other possible reaction was there, though, unnerved her. If Time had been different would ne not have left?

"Jack," she said, intending to bring this up. There was no answer. When she looked up at him, she saw that his face had blanked out once more.

After that it was somewhat easier. The upload took more time. He had been gone much longer than he had been with her, or even than he had been in Cardiff. Counting even the time he was buried under the city, she believed. But was easier now to be able to joke comfortably with him. To say "Do you remember…?" and make him laugh, so the force of what he was recollecting wouldn't hit him quite as hard. At night he still cried out sometimes, waking her more often from a sound sleep than Anwen did.

For two more weeks their days were guided by the things that were going on in Jack's mind. So not that different than Torchwood circa 2008, Gwen thought as she peered into the living room where he was sitting, staring at the wall. Anwen played with a set of blocks by his feet. It amused Gwen to know that these were still the most-proffered baby toys even with the technology that surrounded them.

The scene looked rather cozy; as though Jack had come for tea, if one ignored the pile of blankets in the corner where they went during the day. All it needed was Rhys. And Ianto, of course, but her longing for Rhys was the constant pain now. It had been buried by adrenaline for a while, but when it resurfaced it became a constant weight on her chest. She wanted to go home. She wanted to take Jack with her, of course, but she wanted to go home.

Without warning, Jack shot up from the couch. "I'm going to kill him!" he shouted. "Really going to kill him this time."

"Whoa, whoa, who are we killing?" Gwen asked, running over to him. She held his arms firmly between their bodies, keeping him there. "Because I imagine the sentence for murder around these parts is still pretty rough."

"John Hart." Jack spat, his disheveled hair and wild eyes making him definitely look homicidal. "He sent me to Cardiff too late; he's the reason I thought—that I thought—I thought you were dead."

"Well, I well could be by 2018. Who knows?" she said.

He turned his gaze on her. "You know what he did?" he demanded.

"Course I do. He told me where to find you when you went to Boeshane. He didn't mean to do it, Jack. He was trying to help you, only I don't think he knows how to help people without buggering something else."

Jack's laugh was hollow, but he seemed to settle. After a few minutes Gwen was confident enough that he wasn't about to go chasing down John Hart to let him go. "That's it then," she said. "You remember that, so that's it isn't it? There's not long to go."

"No," Jack agreed, sitting back down on the sofa. "I'll be all caught up soon. And we can go."

"Go," Gwen repeated, sitting down in the chair across from him.

"Don't you want to go back to Cardiff? Or did something…?" He looked down at Anwen, and she knew he was thinkng of Rhys.

"No, nothing's happened," she said, eager to set him right. "I just didn't know… what your plans were." She blurted the last bit up, her eyes focused down on Anwen's carefully-constructed block tower.

"How could you not?" he said, sounding incredulous enough for her to turn back to him. "You traveled across thirty centuries to track me down. I'm not just going to disappear again. I know I've done a good job of it before," he added, predicting her next words. "But I'm not going to this time."

"OK," she said. "Good. You can put UNIT in their place."

"My pleasure."

She returned the smile that he gave, but another question quickly occurred to her. "Jack? Isn't that time too far back for you now? You've lived a long time since you were in Cardiff—isn't it lifetimes ago?"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? But it's not. Those times are clearer than most of what I did after. Not all," he added. "Oh I have some stories. But a lot. Maybe it was having you here with me, reviving them each time they should have been piled over. Or maybe those were the years that I was the most me—the most alive. Who knows?"

"Block, Unca Jack," Anwen piped in, offering Jack a block. He took it, turning it over in his hands.

"I know one thing," he said after contemplating it for a long moment. "There's no way I'm starting over in any other time after this. I don't care who appears from fifteen-hundreds needing my help. If I'm immortal forever, I'm going to make it to the end of the universe in a straight line."

Gwen laughed. Jack frowned at her. He was serious, but he had to see that Jack Harkness couldn't make a proclamation like that and have it believed.

"So what do you say, my Ani-girl, are you ready to go home?" Jack said, scooping Anwen up off of the floor and tickling her.

"Home see Tad?" she asked, giggling.

Gwen swallowed, and Jack's eyes solemnly met hers over Anwen's fly-away curls. Neither said anything, but from that gaze she knew that he would never say anything about what had happened—or almost happened-- between them on the night that she dragged him out of the bar and to her flat. She would have to tell him herself, somehow, but how to explain the necessity of it. Or the feeling that they were out of time, out of their timelines. It was as much another world as Torchwood was when she had first started there and only Owen understood. Except now Rhys knew. Except now she was married.

And he'd never trust her with Jack—oh he'd say he did, but there would always be… tension. Watching Jack sitting on the sofa bouncing Anwen on his lap she knew that the last thing she wanted was tension. There was nothing for Rhys to worry about anyway. Now that Jack was properly Jack again she didn't feel the same way about it. There was history there, there was Ianto's memory, and something else that she couldn't put her finger on. It went back to the day in the vaults when she had shown him her engagement ring. He'd let her go, and that was that.

There would be emotions to deal with, truths and lies to confront, memories to dwell on. Gwen rested her forehead on her fingers as she thought of it, but as she did she focused on the smiles on the two in the room with her. At that moment, so far away from all that she knew, they were all that mattered.

***

The water of Cardiff Bay glistened in the early morning light. Gwen shivered as the temperature began to shift from the cool of darkness to the warmth of morning. The ever-present wind whipped her hair about, and dried the skin on her face, but she couldn't bring herself to care.

"Wasn't there a time when you would be chasing me up here?"

"There was," she agreed, not turning. Jack appeared by her side a moment later, looking over the edge of the roof to the Bay. "I wanted to come up, make sure it was all intact."

"Couldn't trust me alone with the city for two months?" he teased, reaching out to pull he hair back from her face.

"That's a losing battle. And no, I couldn't. I almost thought you'd gone again when you weren't there to welcome me, but Rhys set me straight."

"Bet he did more than that." Jack smirked.

"Mmm, yes, not that it's any of your business. He was quite pleased to see me. Though I doubt more than I was to see him. I think Anwen had me beat, though. She wouldn't let her 'Tad' out of her sight until she went to sleep. He's keeping her with him today, afraid going to the crèche would frighten her."

"Good thinking," Jack murmured.

They stood in silence for a long time. Light continued to fill the sky, and the city awoke beneath them. The wind was chapping Gwen's lips, but she couldn't will herself to move. "How are you, Jack?" She finally asked. She knew how feeble her words sounded. She meant so much more by them. Are you staying? Do you hate me for bringing you back? Are you Torchwood again? Then what does that make me?

"I'm all right. Busy. It's hard being a one-man show."

"What do you mean?" She raised an eyebrow. "Did you chase UNIT off, then?"

"I did. Their general owed me a favour. He was only too happy for that favour to be that they backed the hell off."

"So if you did that… why not start a new team?"

"I can't do that." His spoke as though she was missing something obvious. Forgetting some law of physics that made her theory impossible.

"Why's that?"

"Because, it would be subordination to start a new team without the commander."

She turned to him. "What?" she asked, unsble to check the incredulous smile that was spreading on her face.

"Believe it or not, Gwen, I don't want to be a leader. A loner, maybe, but not a leader."

She shook her head. "But why? You're brilliant at it."

"I'm brilliant at a lot of things." She laughed, though she knew that only encouraged his arrogance. "It doesn't mean I like them. I like being equals. Partners. What do you say, Gwen Cooper. Be my partner in Torchwood?"

She couldn't quite believe what she was hearing. Jack was always their fearless leader. Without him they had been grasping at straws, trying to hold themselves together day-in and day-out. But that had been without Jack. Working with Jack would be a whole other thing—a challenge perhaps, but also exciting. And somewhere they would probably both be aware that his experience trumped whatever leadership abilities she had, to some degree. It wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been all that was left, either, but it was a good plan.

"Sure," she agreed.

He grinned, and put his arm around her. "It brings back memories, being back in Cardiff."

She nodded. "And…er…. Is that a good thing?"

"Do you know? I think it is," he said, grinning down at her. "Now come on. I'll buy you a coffee before we go investigate the Splooten sighting near the Castle."

She nodded, but didn't follow him down the stairs just yet. "We have to change things, Jack," she said, looking down at the concrete. "Torchwood will not be said in scorn by Cardiff's citizens any more. We have to revive it; revive the legend. Show them that they need us. We messed up, but we're human. That's the point, isn't it? That we're human?"

He regarded her solemnly, and she wondered how this determination fit in with his memories of her. Would the computer have considered it out of character? Perhaps, but Jack didn't, judging by the sharp nod he gave her. "Come on then," he said. "We've got a lot of work to do."

He offered her his hand, and she took it. Together they went down to the streets that they were sworn to protect.

And that was almost it. They became so busy that they almost forgot that there had been a time when Jack was not there. Gwen's dreams about living in the 51st Century were almost only dreams. She could almost believe that. Except.

Except for the afternoon when she was running across the Plass to catch up with Jack, and a woman stopped her. She didn't touch her, merely cleared her throat as Gwen passed, but she stopped in her tracks. River Song stood there in the same dress she had worn the night that she gave Gwen the vortex manipulator. She was smiling, and Gwen noted how pretty she looked in the daylight.

"You did it, Gwen Cooper."

"I suppose you want this?" Gwen asked, beginning to detach the Vortex Manipulator that was still on her wrist.

"You suppose right," River agreed. As she spoke she turned her head a fraction of an inch in Jack's direction. He was facing them, obviously wondering where Gwen was, but the sun was behind them, so he wouldn't see them clearly. "Can't leave this lying around the 21st Century, as my brother has been told. Take care of him, will you? I won't say hello now, though I will see you soon. Spoilers."

"Your brother?" Gwen said, but River put a finger to her lips. The Vortex Manipulator was on her arm, and she was gone a moment later. Gwen stood staring at the place where she had been, until Jack's voice reached her ears.

"Gwen, get a move on!"

She hesitated for only a moment longer, before beginning to run again. The future could keep its mysteries, she decided, and the past its sorrows. She'd take the now, because it was, after all, the only thing that was certain, Time being what it was.

Yes, she affirmed to herself, catching up with Jack. He was grinning, as were Rhys and Anwen who were waiting for them on the other side of the Plass.

Making memories was the best part of it all.


End file.
